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"...anyone who's not involved in CS research treats the products of this endeavor as if they were smallpox-infected blankets. Even when it is clearly - in my op

"...anyone who's not involved in CS research treats the products of this endeavor as if they were smallpox-infected blankets. Even when it is clearly - in my opinion - good, it winds up ignored. Because of the inescapable grant-related propaganda, it's impossible to tell what's good and what's not. For example, recently some of the same people involved in the PL research I so dislike built a language called Cyclone, which adds some very useful safety features to C. There are still zillions of free-software projects written in C, and probably most of them could benefit from upgrading to Cyclone. But the thing has the academic kiss of death on it, and no one will touch it. The mailing list is virtually empty. This is not just prejudice. It is rational mistrust. Academics, as we've seen, have no incentive to build software that's actually relevant, and every incentive to build software that appears to be relevant. They have every incentive to overpromote, and no incentive at all to build an actual user base. In fact, an actual user base is an enormous drag for a CS researcher, because it demands actual support, which does not advance the researcher's career at all. Also, because of the nefarious Bayh-Dole act, CS researchers are frequently armwrestled into patenting their work, which of course they have no incentive to disclose. If the rest of these factors didn't give you a reason not to use academic software, this certainly would. The result is a world of Potemkin software which appears to be enormously useful, even revolutionary. In reality it is unusable. The researchers are some of the smartest people in the world, and surely some of what they're doing has some merit. But it is almost impossible to figure out what's wheat and what's chaff, and most sensible people just don't come near it." - Mencius Moldbug's Unqualified Reservations (http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/08/whats-wrong-with-cs-research.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/08/whats-w...)

neilc 17y ago
The stuff about going after patents isn't true in my experience: I can't think of a single prominent CS academic researcher in systems/PL who spends a lot of time going after patents (... unless they do a startup company, of course). But otherwise, sure -- academics aren't incentivized to produce usable, non-prototype software. Sometimes they do anyway, but they aren't really rewarded for it professionally (with a few exceptions: e.g. Chord). That is especially true of something like Cyclone, which would require pretty considerable effort to support. The hope is that by writing papers that clearly describe a new idea, practitioners can make use of ideas developed by researchers (e.g. Cassandra is heavily influenced by the Dynamo paper). That's not always true, but forcing academics to write production-quality software and then provide support for it probably wouldn't make a lot of sense either.
- xenonite 17y ago
  > I can't think of a single prominent CS academic researcher in systems/PL who spends a lot of time going after patents Well.. what does "prominent" mean? A professor of mine has 10x more patents than papers. He once said, he is angry about not being prominent because of too many patents! (no papers but patents = holding knowledge back = disturbing innovation?)
pgbovine 17y ago
what the author of this quote doesn't seem to understand is that the primary output of academic research in CS is not an industrial-strength implementation of an actual product, but rather is a prototype whose ideas can be transferred into future products. it's unreasonable to expect a group of graduate students and professors to build software on par with well-tested, well-QAed open-source or commercial products ... i agree that researchers often don't have an incentive to make robust, industrial-strength implementations of their work, but some systems hackers are actually quite good at making real software that people actually use. examples: - Unison file synchronizer (UPenn research project) http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/ http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/ - gprof program profiler (http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=989401 http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=989401) - the Scala language (http://www.scala-lang.org/ http://www.scala-lang.org/) most of the time, though, the way that CS systems research impacts the world is by: a.) the researchers founding their own company from their research - e.g., VMWare, and more recently KSplice (http://www.ksplice.com/ http://www.ksplice.com/) b.) a big company implementing features in their own products based on research findings - e.g., machine learning at Google, OS security in Google Chrome, and even gasp OS security in Microsoft Windows OS
- scott_s 17y ago
  This is dead-on. Research is not the same as development.

neilc 17y ago

The stuff about going after patents isn't true in my experience: I can't think of a single prominent CS academic researcher in systems/PL who spends a lot of time going after patents (... unless they do a startup company, of course). But otherwise, sure -- academics aren't incentivized to produce usable, non-prototype software. Sometimes they do anyway, but they aren't really rewarded for it professionally (with a few exceptions: e.g. Chord). That is especially true of something like Cyclone, which would require pretty considerable effort to support. The hope is that by writing papers that clearly describe a new idea, practitioners can make use of ideas developed by researchers (e.g. Cassandra is heavily influenced by the Dynamo paper). That's not always true, but forcing academics to write production-quality software and then provide support for it probably wouldn't make a lot of sense either.

xenonite 17y ago
> I can't think of a single prominent CS academic researcher in systems/PL who spends a lot of time going after patents Well.. what does "prominent" mean? A professor of mine has 10x more patents than papers. He once said, he is angry about not being prominent because of too many patents! (no papers but patents = holding knowledge back = disturbing innovation?)

pgbovine 17y ago

what the author of this quote doesn't seem to understand is that the primary output of academic research in CS is not an industrial-strength implementation of an actual product, but rather is a prototype whose ideas can be transferred into future products. it's unreasonable to expect a group of graduate students and professors to build software on par with well-tested, well-QAed open-source or commercial products ... i agree that researchers often don't have an incentive to make robust, industrial-strength implementations of their work, but some systems hackers are actually quite good at making real software that people actually use. examples: - Unison file synchronizer (UPenn research project) http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/ http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/ - gprof program profiler (http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=989401 http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=989401) - the Scala language (http://www.scala-lang.org/ http://www.scala-lang.org/) most of the time, though, the way that CS systems research impacts the world is by: a.) the researchers founding their own company from their research - e.g., VMWare, and more recently KSplice (http://www.ksplice.com/ http://www.ksplice.com/) b.) a big company implementing features in their own products based on research findings - e.g., machine learning at Google, OS security in Google Chrome, and even gasp OS security in Microsoft Windows OS

scott_s 17y ago
This is dead-on. Research is not the same as development.